Beyond Next Token Prediction: Patch-Level Training for Large Language Models
The prohibitive training costs of Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a significant bottleneck in the development of next-generation LLMs. In this paper, we show that it is possible to significantly reduce the training costs of LLMs without sacrificing their performance. Specifically, we introduce patch-level training for LLMs, in which multiple tokens are aggregated into a unit of higher information density, referred to as a `patch', to serve as the fundamental text unit for training LLMs. During patch-level training, we feed the language model shorter sequences of patches and train it to predict the next patch, thereby processing the majority of the training data at a significantly reduced cost. Following this, the model continues token-level training on the remaining training data to align with the inference mode. Experiments on a diverse range of models (370M-2.7B parameters) demonstrate that patch-level training can reduce the overall training costs to 0.5$\times$, without compromising the model performance compared to token-level training. Source code: https://github.com/shaochenze/PatchTrain.
Code (1)
Tasks
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Beyond Next-Token: Next-X Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation
Autoregressive (AR) modeling, known for its next-token prediction paradigm, underpins state-of-the-art language and visual generative models. Traditionally, a ``token'' is treated as the smallest prediction unit, often a…
Image Generationtoken-classificationToken ClassificationNext Patch Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation
Autoregressive models, built based on the Next Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm, show great potential in developing a unified framework that integrates both language and vision tasks. In this work, we rethink the NTP for …
Image GenerationPredictionScratchpad Patching: Decoupling Compute from Patch Size in Byte-Level Language Models
Tokenizer-free language models eliminate the tokenizer step of the language modeling pipeline by operating directly on bytes; patch-based variants further aggregate contiguous byte spans into patches for efficiency. Howe…
Beyond ViT Tokens: Masked-Diffusion Pretrained Convolutional Pathology Foundation Model for Cell-Level Dense Prediction
Cell-level dense prediction is central to computational pathology, but remains challenging due to fine-grained histological structures, strong domain shifts, and costly dense annotations. Existing ViT-based pathology fou…
Representation LearningInformation Flow Routes: Automatically Interpreting Language Models at Scale
Information flows by routes inside the network via mechanisms implemented in the model. These routes can be represented as graphs where nodes correspond to token representations and edges to operations inside the network…